This study examined the influence of cognate status and language distance on simultaneous bilingual children's vocabulary acquisition. It aimed to tease apart effects of word-level similarities and language-level similarities, while also exploring the role of individual-level variation in age, exposure, and nontarget language proficiency. Children…

People use different communication patterns based on the context and who they are addressing. These differences, known as linguistic register, are common across human speech and recognized early in development. Here, we examine 4-11-year-old American children's (N = 227) ability to use linguistic registers to determine a speaker's addressee as…

This inquiry into the location of the linguistic repertoire was driven by a pedagogical encounter with mounting putty, the white adhesive used to attach materials to another surface. This encounter began at a community writing center during a writing workshop I was teaching on poesía bilingüe when children took up the putty, creating objects that…

This study evaluates the impact of a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tool for the acquisition of academic English and oral language skills in children learning English as a second language. Using a quasi-experimental design, we compare English proficiency scores for K-5 students who did or did not use the program during the 2020-21…

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian 'o') in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian - L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence 'This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper'. According to the…

Purpose: Bilingual children's speech often contains high percentages of disfluencies in both their languages; however, the distribution of disfluency types and the difference across bilinguals' two languages have received insufficient and inconsistent empirical support. The present research aims to profile "typical" bilingual disfluency…

The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers--that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child…

Storytelling has a long tradition in education including language learning and teaching because of its extensive benefits in language development. In second and foreign language education, stories and storytelling have been integrated into school curricula to enhance language development; however, there is scarce empirical evidence about how…

This study investigates the use of overt and null subjects in Bulgarian in child heritage speakers with L2 German. The alternation of overt and null pronominal subjects in null-subject languages like Bulgarian depends on grammatical and discourse conditions and contrasts with German. Oral narratives were elicited in Bulgarian, comparing the…

When teaching Mandarin Chinese classifiers, teachers usually ask students to memorize 'classifier + noun', phrases as collocations. Given that Mandarin Chinese has a vast and complicated system of classifiers, the rote memorization of 'classifier + noun' collocations is challenging and monotonous. Therefore, the present study aims to improve that…

Purpose: Identification of speech sound disorder (SSD) in children who are multilingual is challenging for many speech-language pathologists (SLPs). This may be due to a lack of clinical resources to accurately identify SSD in multilingual children as easily as for monolingual children. The purpose of this article is to describe features of…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

Studies of non-linguistic statistical learning (SL) have often linked performance in SL tasks with differences in language outcomes. Most of these studies have focused on Western and high-income educational contexts, but children worldwide learn in radically different educational systems and communities, and often in a second language. In the west…

This article examines the determinants of Syrian refugee students' language comprehension difficulties in Lebanon, Türkiye and Australia, three host countries offering refugees different types of legal status (short-term, medium-term and long-term legal settlement). To understand the influence of legal status and its corresponding educational…

Spanish-speaking students constitute the largest subgroup of emergent bilingual (EB) students in the United States. Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative sample of Spanish-English EBs, we explore profiles of English reading trajectories and how early individual differences (i.e., early Spanish reading and English oral proficiency)…